An early display of Stevens’ expertise, “Peter Quince at the Clavier” (1923) employs a four-part symphonic form to intone modernist dissonance. A hymn to impermanence, the musical stanzas, each in its distinctive rhythm and line length, arise from the playing on a Renaissance keyboard instrument by a rustic laborer, the director of the masque “Pyramus and Thisbe,” which concludes William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Through a graphic scenario, his thoughts on the effects of music on the spirit draw an analogy with the beauty of Susanna, whose naked loveliness stirred the elders to pry into her private bliss. With a pun on bass/base, the poet ridicules the throb of passion in the old men that produces “pizzicati of Hosannas,” a reference to the plucking of strings to produce a lightly separated flow of melody.
In Stanza 2, Stevens slows the four beats of the previous tetrameter to an emotionally composed two-beat dimeter interspersed with triplets or trimeter. The crescendo of drama replaces fluctuating strings with the clamor of cymbals and horns. Resuming a four-beat line, he elongates the lifting of lamps, by which ineffectual Byzantine attendants, arriving too late to be of help, disclose the elders leering at Susanna’s nakedness. Departing from the legend, the poet closes with an ode to beauty, noting that the details of the story are secondary to the importance of beauty itself. Although Susanna’s admirable physique could not last, the memory of her loveliness survives “Death’s ironic scraping,” leaving a memory as clear as the sweep of a bow over a viol. That, insists the poet, is the constant of art.
Derived from an agnostic era, “Sunday Morning” (1923), a 120-line blank verse statement of the conflict between faith and poetry, voices Stevens’ long-running personal debate on the existence of God. The verbal music wraps the speaker in a sustaining melody. Content in her reverie, she avoids Christian ritual and traditions and questions, “What is divinity if it can come / Only in silent shadows and in dreams?” She finds spiritual renewal in “balm or beauty of the earth,” which challenges trite, worn-out concepts of heaven.
Foremost in the speaker’s doubt about an afterlife is the absence of completion, which she depicts as fruit that never ripens and rivers that never find the sea. Without death, she declares, mystical beauty has no aim, no fulfillment. The speaker exalts “the measures destined for her soul,” a primitive concept that the absorption of the body into nature is a more appropriate form of immortality than heaven. Stanza 7 asserts that art, represented by human chanting, encapsulates history, that is, “whence they came and whither they shall go.” Rounding out the poem is a return to the vision of wings, which bear “casual flocks of pigeons” to their graceful demise, emphasized by the alliteration of “Downward to darkness.” As though enfolding a small portion of life, the span, unlike Christian images of up-stretched flight, embrace earth in their final moments.
In line with the thinking of “Sunday Morning,” Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (1923) continues the thread of logic that death is an essential element of life. In two octaves bizarrely joyous in rhythm and tone, he arranges imperatives—call, bid, let bring, let be—to the attendants of the dead as the droll funereal rites take shape. The piling up of death images frames the finality of passage as well as an end to posturing, an end to desire. In a line that demystifies ritual grief, the cigar roller whips up “concupiscent curds” in kitchen cups, a lengthening of hard-edged cacophonies of alliterated K sounds to express the artificiality of mourning. Modern standards of grief take shape in the wenches’ “usual” dress and boys bearing floral arrangements in discarded newspaper. However well performed, none of these actions stops the finality of death.
For good reason, Stevens repeats the title image in lines 8 and 16. The notion of decay, embodied in the dresser lacking knobs, expands with the image of failed pride, which the dead woman once depicted in embroidery as a peacock’s spread tail. The feet of the deceased, grotesquely callused and oddly removed from the attendants’ scurrying, symbolize the cold, unresponsive state of the corpse, now made dumb by the absence of speech. Like the bird’s tail in stitchery, the “horny” feet have surrendered any connection with sexual desire or function. When the body is arranged and the lamp lighted, Stevens insists that earthly sway belongs to the emperor of ice cream, a theatrical mockery of permanence.
Celebrating poet and verse, “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1936) expresses Stevens’ concept of art by dramatizing an unassuming singer lofting a song to the sea. The poet proposes an outlandish rearrangement of the usual romantic notions of the majestic sea: As though imposing artistic order on nature, the singer reduces the sea to “merely a place by which she walked to sing,” uplifting herself by creating melody. In the poet’s expanded view, the singer represents “the single artificer of the world,” a station that elevates her above nature’s “constant cry” with the imaginative ordering of notes into musical phrasing.
In lines 33 to 34, the poet-speaker, certain that the sea is not a mask or source of imitation for the singer, begins a series of hyperboles that place high value on the creative power of artistry. As the poem shifts away from the singer, the poet-speaker challenges philosopher Ramon Fernandez to explain another enigma—how light orders and arranges something so vast and insuperable as darkness. The implication is that mysticism poses no answer that can be expressed in human terms. In its final five-line stanza, an emotional “Oh” introduces a prayerful apostrophe to order amid chaos. The poet, content with the limitations of human art, stops short of reconciling philosophy with art.
